Government cuts are a huge gamble

It will take time for people to absorb the full impact of last week’s Spending Review, but the scale of the Tory-LibDem cuts is now clear.

Leicester Council’s budget has been cut by almost a third. Leicestershire police face a 20 per cent cut. The NHS, which is supposedly ‘protected’, will have to cope with a mere 0.1 percent increase – something it has never done before.

On top of this, we now learn Leicester has to cut 40 per cent from our school building programme, which the Secretary of State for Education promised less than 3 months ago would be ‘unaffected’.

The Tories and LibDems want to blame Labour for these cuts, but the truth is that the banks caused the recession. We had to borrow money to bail them out, to stop our economy from collapsing and avoid the recession becoming a depression. Labour should admit we failed to put in place sufficiently tough bank regulation, as did other countries. But people shouldn’t forget the Tories constantly criticised Labour for too much regulation in the City, not too little.

The challenge now is to reduce the deficit at the right pace and in the right way. The Tory-LibDem cuts go too deep, too fast and could end up costing us more.